I'm trying to use alsa for sound on my ultra 80 with the 2.6.5 kernel. I've been following the instructions in the gentoo alsa guide but I'm stuck at a certain point. I'm at the point where the guide says to use amixer to unmute the volume but amixer returns this:
> amixer
amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such device

I looked in /dev/and there are no devices for audio but I know I compiled in the support for cs4231 in the kernel.

However, I strongly recommend you do not use this as any alsa program that accesses those devices once they are available will lock up your machine. This is a kernel bug.

If you have built and loaded the snd-oss-pcm and snd-oss-mixer kernel options you can use regular mixer applications such as aumix without a problem.

One thing to keep in mind is that the driver for the onboard audio in the Ultra workstations (cs4231) does not seem to be functioning correctly although it will build and load correctly on the PCI based Ultras (Ultra 5 and up).

You probably won't have much luck with audioctl as alsa devices don't provide the same interface that sparc audio did in 2.4. I've been thinking that perhaps the mixer using the alsa interface might be able to do some of those options but the problems with snd-ioctl32 are preventing any testing along those lines.